


Arms Race

by ArtemisTheHuntress



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: "Medical Ethics what medical ethics" - Naomi Hunter probably, And then there ended up not even being any arms dealing, Canon Compliant, Gen, The working title for this was 'Arm Stealing for Arms Dealing'
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-09
Updated: 2018-03-09
Packaged: 2019-03-23 15:55:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13791081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArtemisTheHuntress/pseuds/ArtemisTheHuntress
Summary: Instead of answering her question, Ocelot asked, “How long after death would an arm still be viable if the body was kept in cryogenic storage?”Naomi decided to stop asking questions.---Revolver Ocelot and Naomi Hunter go steal an arm.  Naomi has some regrets but not enough.





	Arms Race

The cell floor was cement, uncomfortable and dirty, but Naomi Hunter had stopped caring a week ago. She lay on her back, her hair splayed out around her face, her feet up on the wall, focusing on the blood rushing to her head and trying to calculate if it was enough to make her pass out. She wasn’t afraid, not really, but she wasn’t defiant anymore, either. Just bored.

The state department had dragged her away in handcuffs, which, while unfortunate, wasn’t all that unexpected. What she hadn’t expected was the waiting. After the first several hours in a makeshift holding cell staffed by a quickly-rotating gaggle of panicky guards who had clearly never prepared for a disaster of this magnitude, they’d moved her to a much more high-security, much less frenetic prison. She’d been here in this cell for three weeks, and there seemed to be no plans to do anything about her. The stony-faced staff had brought her out for extensive, gruelling sessions of questioning twice, but after the hours in a slightly different concrete room under slightly different fluorescent lights, in which she’d _mostly_ told the truth (because what was the point in lying? She’d accomplished most of what she wanted to do, and lost most of what mattered to her), they just led her back down the hall to here. No information, no promises, not even any threats.

“What are you doing on the floor?” came the gruff voice of the guard on duty. “Get up.”

Naomi turned her head and stared straight into his eyes. He was glaring, his hand on the gun at his hip, as if he expected that her lying on the floor was part of some nefarious plot. She blinked, once, slowly, a dare. She didn’t change her position. The guard huffed his indignation and moved on.

Irrelevant.

Her head was pounding now. At least the discomfort was something to focus on, something new to think about. She could feel her heartbeat in her forehead, a steady thrum that felt each time a half-step closer to a migraine.

_Why did you do it, Frank?_

No—the whole point of this exercise was to think about something _else_ —

_Why him? After everything, why did you have to go and die for him?_

Naomi squeezed her eyes shut and matched her breaths to the pulsing in her head. Counting, trying to make the numbers fill up her mind. In-two-three out-two-three in-two-three out-two-three… focus. Focus on nothing. _Don’t_ focus on those last moments in Shadow Moses, don’t remember the crackly sound of Frank’s scream filtered through Snake’s codec as she sat useless in her stupid little office with the barricaded door—

She was so deliberately trying to filter out everything but the sound of her breath that she almost didn’t hear the explosion.

Her eyes snapped open. Was that in her head? Was the pounding of blood against her temples starting to—

Another explosion. Louder. Closer. Alarm sirens shrieked, breaking into her consciousness.

A dark shape rolled into the corner of her vision.

She whipped her head around to stare at it. It took her a moment to place what she was seeing, and then, with a jolt, she jerked her shoulders around _hard_ , rolled away, tucked her knees and her chin close into her chest, hands over the back of her neck and eyes shut tight as the grenade exploded behind her.

The roar of the blast was replaced almost immediately with ringing silence that mixed with her heartbeat sounding in her ears. She was disoriented but not injured, and her instincts from the battlefield took over. She hadn’t faced a grenade in—god, years; she’d been twelve, maybe, the last time she’d had to run and duck among explosions—

_(She’s twelve, and the compound has been breached; she runs towards the inner wall but they’ve locked the doors, and there are grenades flying in to flush out any guards inside the outer wall, and the early afternoon African sun is bright in her eyes but not as bright as the phosphorous grenades exploding across her vision in white heat and sending up flames across the flat ring of scrubland—she knows how to protect her head, her neck, her core, but the fire is bearing down on her and then Frank is there, Frank is always there, and he grabs her hand and shouts “Kichui, get down!” as another explosion rocks the ground almost beneath her feet—)_

Her body remembered what to do. Naomi kicked off against the floor, rolling into a standing position in one movement, pulling the collar of her turtleneck up over her mouth and nose at the same time to avoid choking on the settling concrete dust. A wave of dizziness stuck her as she straightened up; god _damn_ that attempt to alleviate her boredom had been stupidly self-destructive. What had she been thinking? (She knew what she’d been thinking. Stupid self-destruction ran in the family, it seemed.)

She heard skittering on the floor again, and crouched, ready to move, but it passed by and a moment later an explosion rocked the next cell over instead.

The grenade had cracked the cinderblock wall of her cell. As the dust cleared, she could see the metal door hanging twisted and half-off its hinges now, only tenuously held onto the wall. There were shouts, and gunshots, off down the hall, but they were distant. Whatever else this was, it was her chance.

Naomi ran the two steps across her cell and yanked on the barred metal door, finishing the job and tearing it down to the ground. Another grenade sailed over her head and skittered down the hallway, rocking yet another cell farther down the line with a blast of destruction. She stepped backward, scanning the hallway for other exits, because it hardly seemed fair for a miraculous opportunity to present itself and then only face her with the choice of running deeper into the area that was clearly the target of the attacks, or forward into the bomber himself.

Well, a bomber she could handle, at least. It would hardly be the first time—

“Well, Dr. Hunter. A pleasure to meet you here.”

Naomi hissed a breath in through her clenched teeth, surprise and fear twisting in her belly. She had no weapons. She dropped into a CQC stance, movements she hadn’t used in more than a decade. She’d never been good at hand-to-hand, never liked the visceral brutality of it, had always relied on being quick and smart and small instead of strong. But Frank had insisted (“You need to be able to defend yourself in this world, kichui,”) and now that the heat of the moment had come, he had been right when he said if she got the movements down she’d never forget.

A slightly lopsided figure walked calmly, deliberately, through the dust and rubble. He _jangled_. Naomi didn’t trust him.

“I would advise against tryi—” he tried to drawl. Naomi didn’t let him finish. She lunged. Left shoulder down, right shoulder up, right hand arcing over to grab his left shoulder, what looked to be his good arm. A move to pin, to knock him off-balance, buy herself time to run. He swerved back but she pivoted on her heel and latched on—but then, up close and uncomfortably personal, she saw his face, and the shock made her falter. He took the split-second lapse to ram his elbow into her ribs, sending her staggering to catch her footing, mind reeling and at the same time scolding herself for not even considering this coming.

 _“Ocelot?”_ she said, glad the embarrassing shrillness in her voice was muffled by her sweater. “How did you—” Stupid question. This was Revolver Ocelot. “Why are _you_ here?”

He tilted his head in the tiniest shrug and moved to spread his hands out in a conciliatory gesture, which would have been much more powerful if he hadn’t still been holding his gun. Or if he’d had both his hands. “It seemed a pity to let your talents waste away in here.” His voice was scratchy from the dust in the air, but he still managed to sound unbelievably smug.

Naomi straightened up, relaxing her fighting stance, and pulled the collar of her shirt back down off her face. She glared at him. “They told me you were all dead.”

“It’s incredible how many times people manage to be wrong about that,” he said. He didn’t relax his grip on the gun.

Shouts behind her. Pounding feet, almost inaudible over the blaring klaxons but sending vibrations through the floor. They couldn’t stand around talking, not here. What was he _doing?_ No time to care. Whatever his game was, whatever he was planning, Revolver Ocelot had presented her with a way out, and though just a minute ago she’d resigned herself to wasting away in prison for the rest of her short life, she was suddenly very, _very_ ready to take whatever he was about to offer.

He met her eyes. She nodded, slightly, and then pulled in her knees and dropped to the floor as three guards rounded the corner behind her. Almost too fast to see, before the guards could even think about lining up a shot, Ocelot had his gun drawn and fired over her head three times, three short bursts, and then they all fell, too, leaving only the dull wet echoes of their bodies hitting the ground.

Ocelot let out an almost disappointed sigh through his nose. “Pathetic. Nobody knows how to train their soldiers these days.”

Naomi stood, cautiously, keeping an arm’s length away from Ocelot. “What do you want?”

He started walking. “Let’s go,” he said, not looking behind him as he passed her. Not an answer. She fell into step beside him anyway, on his right side, where his arm cut off halfway down the forearm and the sleeve was rolled up and pinned neatly below it. She allowed herself the briefest ghost of a grin.

_(She’s sixteen, and Frank isn’t home very often, but he comes back when he hears she’s been suspended from school for breaking a boy’s nose. “I hoped we could leave violence behind now that you’re in America, kichui.”_

_“It was self-defense,” she says hotly. “He grabbed my boob and laughed about it.”_

_There’s a dark, dangerous glint in Frank’s eye. “Did he, now.”_

_The next day, shocked reports about a shocking, senseless attack on a teenage boy in his own home make statewide news. He’s not dead, thank god, everyone says, shocked, but the attacker cut off his arm at the elbow and then vanished._

_Coincidentally, on the same day, Nina Jaeger disappears from existence, and a Kiki Finch enrolls in a new high school three states away.)_

“So,” Naomi said, “I have a hard time believing FOXHOUND wants me back this badly.”

“FOXHOUND is finished,” Ocelot replied. He strode confidently through the hall, not even hurrying. Naomi wished she could feel that confident about whatever the hell this was. She refused to let herself look down as they stepped over the bodies of the guards, focusing her narrow-eyed sidelong stare at Ocelot’s face, trying to guess what he was thinking. “FOXHOUND was finished the day Outer Heaven fell, but no one had the courage to admit it. It was limping along, a shadow of its former self, completely outliving its usefulness. I just helped the world acknowledge the truth. There are more important things to begin.”

“You—” She’d done her damndest to keep the idiots at FOXHOUND alive for the past five years. Solid Snake being the marked exception, she had objected strongly, and been equally strongly overruled, when the Pentagon informed her three weeks ago that she would be using her work to kill her own patients. Her own _people_. “You wanted this? You _planned_ this?”

“Not all of it,” Ocelot said. “I _planned_ for your virus to kill Solid Snake at that base, but that somehow never happened.” His tone was sharp, accusing.

How the hell he had known in advance about her own addition, she had no idea. “Plans change,” Naomi said.

Ocelot shot two more guards who had the misfortune to try to prevent their brisk escape. Naomi closed her eyes, wished she could close her ears and not hear the gargled death scream. Ocelot didn’t seem to notice, or care. “I thought you would be more upset about that particular failure.”

She shrugged. “There had been enough death.” If he didn’t understand, then she wasn’t going to volunteer anything.

“You seem very unconcerned that the man who destroyed your brother is still free and—”

The flare of anger behind her eyes was so strong she could barely see. Before Ocelot could stop her, Naomi snatched the revolver from his stupid useless right hip holster, stopped dead in her tracks, and pointed it at his head. She was wasting precious time. But if this was how it was going to be, she didn’t care. “Don’t you dare tell me how to feel about my brother.”

Ocelot glared at her. “Give that back.”

“I think I’ll keep it.”

“You don’t even know how to use that,” he complained.

“It’s loaded. I’ll manage.”

Ocelot _humphh_ ed. “Take a SOCOM off a guard if you want a weapon. That one’s mine.”

Naomi started walking again, faster this time. She didn’t give him his revolver back. “Why are you here, Ocelot?”

He scowled. “I’d like your assistance.”

Naomi _laughed_ at that. What was shaping up to be a full-blown terrorist attack on high-security prison was because he would _like_ her _assistance_. Classic Ocelot, really. Never, ever admit you need help. Never admit that you need anyone else for anything. It would be sad if the situation weren’t so grotesquely absurd.

Ocelot’s scowl had turned into a full pout. “Do you want to get out of here or not?” he snapped.

“Hey!” a guard behind them shouted. Without breaking stride, Ocelot took a grenade off his bandolier, pulled out the pin with his teeth, and lobbed it behind him. The explosion cracked the ceiling above their heads.

She wanted to get out of here very much, actually. More with every passing second. She broke into a run. Ocelot followed.

 

* * *

 

“I was the one who drove here in the first place, you know,” Ocelot said. His sulking from the passenger’s seat hadn’t let up for the last three hours. Naomi still found it remarkably satisfying.

“I told you. You can’t drive getaway with one arm. Doctor’s orders.” Maybe she should have been grateful. But, though she didn’t know Ocelot well, she knew him too well for that. He wanted something. She didn’t know what.

Just to spite him, Naomi languidly took one hand off the wheel to adjust her sunglasses. He scowled again.

“Well, then,” he said, “I’m sure you’ll be _very_ pleased to know that that is the exact issue I would like your assistance with.”

She glanced sideways at him. He’d given her curt directions when she refused to let him drive, but hadn’t said anything else regarding where they were going, or what they were actually doing. Naomi had been content, for the moment, to roll down the window and feel the wind in her hair as they barrelled up I-87 in an almost certainly stolen car. She’d been spending the hours making noncommittal noises when Ocelot spoke, trying to remember if she still had any contacts in Mozambique and working out the nearest plausible opportunity to ditch Ocelot and take off by herself. But if he was actually going to tell her something, well, then, this was new.

“I’m a doctor, not a prosthetist,” Naomi said. “I can’t make you a new arm.”

Ocelot scoffed, almost like he was insulted. “I’m not looking for a _prosthetic_.”

“I can’t grow you a new arm, either. Those don’t exactly grow back.”

“You’re trying my patience, Dr. Hunter.”

“This is nowhere near my specialty. I work in genetics. Do you want me to clone you a new arm? Because that’s not how cloning works, either.”

“I _know_ how cloning works,” Ocelot said. Naomi knew she _was_ pushing her luck, but if Ocelot still wasn’t actually pushing back, then clearly he needed her too much to actually do anything about it. That wouldn’t stay true forever, though. She really needed to get out of here at the first opportunity.

“I give up, then,” Naomi said, turning her eyes back to the road. “As traditional a road trip game as twenty questions is, I don’t think this is the time or place for it.”

Silence. Then, “Have you ever done an arm transplant, Dr. Hunter?”

To give Ocelot full credit, he’d come up with something she genuinely hadn’t been expecting. “What?”

“A no, then.”

“A prosthetic is much easier to get. Why do you want a transplant?”

“I told you. I don’t want a prosthetic. I have a specific arm in mind.”

That was the worst possible justification he could have. “Dare I ask who the lucky donor is?”

Instead of answering, he asked, “How long after death would an arm still be viable if the body was kept in cryogenic storage?”

Naomi decided to stop asking questions.

 

* * *

 

They pulled into a cracked and weedy parking lot in a deeply depressing-looking office park in nowhere, upstate New York, at twilight. The squat office building looked unremarkable except for the big, black, dangerous vans parked along the far edge.

“This is a cryogenic storage facility?” Naomi asked, doubtful.

Ocelot got out of the car. “For these situations, it pays not to broadcast what they do.” He shut the door, and held out his hand. Naomi met his eyes and very pointedly put the car keys in her pocket.

The building’s lobby looked as ordinary inside as it did outside. It was hard to believe this was a front for anything at all, and not just a place for bored accountants or engineers to contemplate throwing themselves out the windows. The lady at the reception desk, though, paled when she saw Ocelot walk in. She began, “Mr.—”

“I’m here on behalf of President Sears,” Ocelot said, pulling out a laminated CIA badge that Naomi could not for the life of her tell if it was real or not. “I suppose you know why I’m here.”

The woman nodded. “Of—of course—” Scrambling for an out, she looked at Naomi. “And—you are?”

“A... compatriot of mine, shall we say,” Ocelot said. Naomi shot him a sharp look. He didn’t turn around.

“I can’t—” the woman at reception began.

“Yes you can,” Ocelot said, and his voice was low and dangerous.

The woman nodded. “I’ll have a guard escort you there immediately.”

She dialed the desk phone, and as she talked Naomi mouthed _compatriot?_. Ocelot smirked.

The guard who showed up looked less nervous than the woman at the desk, which Naomi thought was a mistake. He took them down the elevator confidently, his hand resting on his holstered gun with the cocky bravado of someone who had never shot anyone in his life but wanted to. Naomi disliked him immediately.

Belowground, the facility was more what Naomi was expecting. Cold sterile walls that reminded her more of prison than a scientific lab. Armed guards, but, Naomi noticed, the doors weren’t reinforced and there were no metal detectors. Ocelot had closed his coat and the guns at his hips set off no alarms. _Stupid. Stupid._ Clearly this place had been retrofitted for… whatever this was. Whoever this was storing.

Ocelot walked through the facility as if he owned the place, which he possibly did, and like he knew exactly where he was going, which he almost certainly did. Naomi followed him with confidence she didn’t feel. It was clean, clinical, and only staffed with guards. No scientists, only one technician that Naomi could see, though night was falling and anyone _respectable_ had likely gone home. Still, not a traditional cold-storage facility. Not a real scientific lab. This was government, through and through.

Ocelot scanned the rooms as they walked through them, then headed towards the steel door in the back of the largest room. A keycard reader glowed faintly beside it. The door was unmarked. “Can we see this one?”

“Is there something you’re down here _specifically_ to see?” the guard asked, sounding miffed that neither of them was paying attention to him.

“There is, yes,” Ocelot said, and took out a silenced SOCOM and shot him in the head.

Naomi caught him as he fell so the sound wouldn’t alert the others outside. He was dead before gravity even took hold of him. The body, still warm, looking surprised, was so heavy in her hands. She hissed, through clenched teeth, “Are you _trying_ to get us killed?”

Ocelot ignored her. “Naomi, get his keycard. We will have nine minutes and forty-six seconds before the next guard sweep of this room. See that we’re out by then.”

She looked down at the body in her hands. He could barely be more than twenty-five. (But if he knew why they were there, he would have shot them both. Self-defense?) She sighed and rifled through his pockets. On his keyring was a small blank card with a magnetic strip.

 _This one?_ she felt an instinct to ask, because she wanted to say something, but it would be pointless, so she just pressed the card wordlessly against the reader. The door slid open.

Inside it looked like a morgue. Naomi wasn’t sure why she was suddenly struck by that. It _was_ a morgue. Dead bodies in cold storage rather than laid out on tables, but dead bodies laid out all the same.

It was oddly comforting. She knew morgues. These bodies were days or weeks dead. They weren’t _people_ anymore.

“I take it the arm you want is in here?” she asked. She walked along the tall rows of steel and chrome drawers, trailing her fingers along the metal plates marked only with identifying numbers. “Or is this more of a shopping trip? Browse all the different arms the full spectrum of dead humanity has to offer.”

He didn’t acknowledge that. “H3,” Ocelot said.

Obliging, wanting to get this done with as quickly as possible, she pulled open body drawer H3. It was a sealed coffin-sized box of metal with a button pad on top. She flipped up the plastic lid, pressed a button, and with a hiss of escaping subzero pressurized air, the top slid open and she could see inside.

“No,” she said. “I—you can’t be serious. You can’t be _serious._ ” She whirled around. “What the _hell_ , Ocelot?”

It was more shock than actual objection. A dead body was a dead body. But seeing Liquid Snake lying there—his face sunken and desiccated, his already-pale skin now blue-toned with preservative fluid, somehow not looking any more peaceful in death than he ever had in life—they were treading dangerously close to the one place she swore she’d never go. And she had to know.

_(Frank’s skin is cold, where he has any left, and dry as leather, wires running through his veins rather than blood, and as she helps him to his feet Naomi is disgusted with herself for admiring the ingenuity of it—)_

“They wanted to preserve what’s left of Big Boss’s DNA,” Ocelot said. “Even an altered and corrupted version has its place in this world. And the Pentagon wanted to study your FOXDIE. It’s an ingenious piece of work. They were discussing a plea deal for you already, you know. Continue your work on FOXDIE and maybe you would be allowed to go outside sometimes.”

She snorted. “I didn’t plan on living long enough for that to matter.”

“They wouldn’t let you die.”

“They wouldn’t have a choice.” She’d been ready to die. She deliberately hadn’t told them about the cancer, hadn’t taken her nanomachines with her to prison. She’d been… but now looking at Liquid’s body, tracing the curves and hollows of his shoulder muscles with her eyes, breaking them down and separating them out in her mind like puzzle pieces out of textbook diagrams, the thoughts were coming despite herself. _Removing the arm at the shoulder wouldn’t be difficult, and with a scalpel I could peel away the muscles and tendons more cleanly than taking it at the elbow or through the forearm… storage, though. Do they have smaller containers here? They must. But would Ocelot allow me to cut off the rest of his arm? It would make the attachment easier but run a higher risk of dislocation…_

“But why?” Naomi asked. “Why this? What possible purpose could this serve?” _Remove Ocelot’s humerus but leave the muscles as much as possible, maybe, that could help with the dislocation risk…_

Ocelot didn’t lower his head, didn’t even have the decency to look ashamed. He never did. “Don’t tell me you don’t want to destroy the Patriots, Dr. Hunter. Why do you think, of all the doctors in the world, I chose you?”

The Patriots. The—

_(The seething, violent joy of walking out of that lab with Frank, half-supporting his weight as he figured out his new body, tracking Dr. Clark’s blood in smeared footprints behind them. “I’m going to kill them all,” she says, light-headed, almost giddy with rage. “I’m—we’re going to kill them all.”_

_Frank, already regaining his bearings, lets out a sigh through his nose. She can’t see his face but it’s a sigh that she knows means he’s smiling, sadly. “It’s done, kichui,” he says, and it’s such an old nickname, from what feels like another life, a Swahili name that belongs under sun and sky and not this cold cement facility, that she almost laughs and almost cries. Kichui. Little leopard. A fighter’s name. A hunter’s name. Maybe she hasn’t gone anywhere at all. “Let it be done.”_

_She can’t let it be done.)_

“Of course I do,” Naomi said. She didn’t trust him. But maybe she didn’t have to. Maybe this was enough. He could get her back to her lab, back to the nanomachines that would keep her alive and back to the work she’d dedicated her life to doing. Add a new dedication, now. Whether he would was up to debate, but he _could_ , and that would have to do. “How long?”

“Seven minutes, forty seconds,” Ocelot said.

 _The preservative fluid will be tricky. I’ll have to flush it out before I attach it to Ocelot, or it’ll poison him—though. Maybe I should let it. Attach the arm, let it kill him, be free of this whole thing. But I_ could _do it right, I know I could, maybe I could use the saline at the lab…_

Naomi held out her hand. Ocelot stared at her. She glanced over at him, rolled her eyes, sighed. “Scalpel.”

He reached into his coat, pulled out a knife that was not a scalpel at all, long and ugly and designed to cause pain. Well, it wasn’t like Liquid would feel it. It would do. Naomi set to work.


End file.
